Only the teeming right-wing critics of mid-20th century Cahiers du Cinéma could have so fervently opposed the notion of political didacticism in film. Needless to say, this was long before Godard’s own political awakening and the publication’s radical structural shift to a central alignment with Marxist-Leninist and Maoist theory. It is noteworthy to bring this evolution back to light, as the Venice Film Festival’s very own director, Alberto Barbera, called its 83rd edition the “most political ever.” Naturally, films live in the wake of all that has come before them, but the reverberations of the Cahiers days seem to ring louder today than ever before, specifically at international film festivals — venues these same critics once stormed and ultimately upended. This is, of course, a reference to the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but more broadly, and perhaps more fittingly, that moment marks an ideological realignment from the bourgeois escapism of high-art culture to a more accurate showcase of legitimate geopolitical critiques.
Thus, Venice now plays films such as Jelena Maksimović’s Until the Day Ends, a work rooted in the ongoing student protests in Serbia, which began in 2024 after a railway station canopy collapsed, killing 16 people in the process. And just as the cinema has begun speaking for itself, the Serbian protests have metamorphosed into a far more comprehensive civil disobedience — personified here as Lena (Lena Trifunović), an anarchist who must flee Belgrade after a protest breaks out in violence. Her accompanying partner on the trip is Stefan (Andrija Krivokapić), a young man who mistakenly ends up with pro-government loyalists at the violent affair. Before this incident, Until the Day Ends is fairly mundane: Lena looms about with friends, occasionally spray-painting anarchist graffiti onto construction barriers and discussing politics with peers over joints. Evidently, Maksimović’s film is composed almost entirely of non-professional actors, which facilitates the notion of realism she so plainly desires. The same cannot be observed, however, in her mise-en-scène, which employs the aesthetic antithesis to the verisimilitude of her actors, tumbling around in all of the wrong places. That is, Maksimović applies a formal trick of the ever-moving perspective — save for a few prolonged stationary shots — that prefers a pan to the barren side of a highway or a person’s hand, for example, to observing the characters and events of more importance. Thus, much of our focus invariably turns to motionless objects, with the blown-out lens flare of a Janusz Kamiński composition in a 21st-century Spielberg picture.
To see the naive implementation of such aesthetic principles reminds one of the necessity and gravity of a certain formalism in political cinema. We can look back, for example, to the harsh austerity of Italian neorealism, or perhaps to the overtly fantastical nature of a Glauber Rocha film, which both achieve their intended effects but through variable methods. Suffice to say, Maksimović’s aesthetic principles are more aptly categorized as a young director’s embellishment of political realism than either of the aforementioned formal avenues. The distinction must be made, though, between studying the history of cinema and losing oneself in pastiche. Political cinema, by nature, has always constituted a radical contempt for artistic regularity, so the compulsion to reinvent the reinvention may allure the filmmakers of today. But this urge halts at the impasse of necessity. The fall of fascism demanded that cinema be made in a different way, hence yielding to neorealism. Or, as for Rocha, the method by which the film was made must aim to combat colonial rationalism and the bourgeois mentality that induced social injustice. All of which is to say, a film is not effective merely because of its subject matter and assumed political vantage point. Until the Day Ends may strive to encompass a certain political reality, and from the veracious perspective of a neglected nation no less, but it is diminished through its slighting of history and unmeasured devotion to aestheticism.
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